William Crowe Jr.; Joint Chiefs Leader Had Diplomat's Touch

By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 19, 2007

William J. Crowe Jr., 82, a Navy admiral who held the nation's top military job as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the Cold War neared its end and who in retirement publicly criticized military and presidential decisions, died of cardiac arrest Oct. 18 at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.

Adm. Crowe, a nonconformist whose background combined political skills with military experience, led U.S. troops through crises that included the 1986 air raid on Libya and the showdown in the 1980s with Iran over control of the Persian Gulf. He also shortened the military chain of command, broke down interservice rivalries and developed an unprecedented relationship with the head of the Soviet military that helped prevent military confrontations between the two superpowers.

Adm. Crowe also defused a brink-of-war situation in 1988, when he immediately apologized after a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf mistook a civilian jetliner for an Iranian F14 attack fighter and blew it out of the sky, killing 290 civilians.

Those performances and others led the New York Times to call him "the most powerful peacetime military officer in American history."

One of the few Joint Chiefs chairmen who had never led the branch he served in, Adm. Crowe was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1985. He declined a request from President George H.W. Bush to serve a second four-year term.

But unlike the MacArthurian generals who fade away, Adm. Crowe made his retirement years public. He condemned the military's anti-gay bias and the don't ask-don't tell policy, the first officer of his stature to do so. He criticized the buildup to the first Gulf War, endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton when others questioned his lack of military credentials, served as chairman of two boards charged with investigating the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and warned about vulnerable U.S. embassies a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Three years ago, Adm. Crowe was among 27 retired diplomats and military commanders who publicly said the administration of President George W. Bush did not understand the world and was unable to handle "in either style or substance" the responsibilities of global leadership.

A disheveled intellectual, Adm. Crowe (rhymes with brow) had long sailed an independent course. Unlike most four-star admirals, he had not often served at sea; he spent much of his career steering around the reefs and shoals of the Capital Beltway and academia. Such experience proved to be more than adequate for dealing with the Soviets at the end of the Cold War. Adm. Crowe made friends with the Soviet Union's chief of staff, Sergei Akhromeyev, and they signed a breakthrough agreement to avoid military accidents when U.S. and Soviet forces operated near each other.

By his own account, Adm. Crowe said that the most crucial event of his chairmanship was when he told Reagan that military leaders were strongly opposed to a proposal Reagan had made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for both sides to eliminate all ballistic missiles in 10 years. Those missiles were the backbone of the U.S. defense in Europe.

"If he had heard my remarks, it was not obvious to me," Adm. Crowe wrote in his autobiography "The Line of Fire" (1993). Reagan's proposal disappeared without a trace. "I had weathered a crisis and had decided to take the risk."

As a leader, he was an independent thinker, noted for his shrewd geopolitical analysis and military strategizing.

In a 47-year military career, Adm. Crowe commanded U.S. forces in the Middle East, was the commander in chief of NATO forces in southern Europe and led the largest U.S. military operation in terms of geography, the U.S. Pacific Command. He was also chairman of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under Clinton.

An Auspicious Start

Adm. Crowe was born in La Grange, Ky. After growing up in the un-maritime environment of Oklahoma, he chose an unorthodox career path. After spending a year at the University of Oklahoma, he headed to the U.S. Naval Academy, where his peers in the Class of 1946 included such future leaders as former president Jimmy Carter, Vice Adm. James Stockdale and CIA chief Stansfield Turner.

Chafing under the academy's discipline, Adm. Crowe nevertheless excelled academically. According to a 1997 article in Stanford magazine, he led the Navy debate team to victory over Army on the question of whether there should be compulsory military training. Navy argued against it.

Adm. Crowe's first military assignment was on a destroyer-minesweeper, then he joined the submarine service. After receiving a master's degree in personnel management from Stanford in 1956, Adm. Crowe got his first command in 1960, on the diesel sub USS Trout.

When the cantankerous Adm. Hyman Rickover sent word that the young officer should join the nuclear submarine corps, Adm. Crowe declined because he had just started working on a master's degree and a doctorate in political science at Princeton University. After he turned Rickover down a second time, many predicted that his Navy career was finished.

Armed with the degrees, received in 1964 and 1965, Adm. Crowe found ways to excel in the dead-end positions to which he was assigned.

Instead of getting a prestigious Pentagon post, he was sent to the same position he would have received without a graduate degree, chief of staff to the commander of a submarine squadron. He moved to a Pentagon post in political affairs, where he learned the perceived value of his doctorate after submitting a paper suggesting a change in Navy procedure.

"For Chrissake," his boss said, according to Adm. Crowe's 1993 autobiography, "we didn't send you to Princeton so you could come back and tell us how to run the Navy. We sent you up there to learn how to argue for the things we want back here, not to listen to what you think are original ideas."

Later, in Vietnam, he was refused command of a surface ship, so the not-yet-admiral became an adviser to the Vietnamese river force, known as the "brown water Navy" that plied the Mekong Delta. He did well, exercising his diplomatic and political skills, but his next post was lobbying Congress on the status of Micronesia.

In 1974, Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, chief of naval operations, ordered promotion boards to consider "iconoclasts" for higher ranks. Adm. Crowe's work in Vietnam paid off, and he was promoted to rear admiral. He became deputy director of Navy planning and went on to the Pentagon's "little State Department," the International Security Affairs Office, where he specialized in East Asia and the Pacific.

He commanded the nation's smallest fleet, the Middle East force of four ships based in Bahrain. The oil state wanted the Navy to leave its bases. But Adm. Crowe, using his diplomatic skills, negotiated a complex deal that resulted in a floating command that included access to Bahrain's essential maintenance facilities and cut the U.S. rent in half.

Back at the Pentagon in 1977, he was put in charge of plans, policy and operations for the Navy. Through that office, the Navy jousted for missions with the other military branches.

Fans in the Air Force, Army

His talents were more widely appreciated among Air Force and Army generals than among his Navy colleagues. "He saved my sleep, my hair, my digestion and my sanity," said Gen. Edward C. Meyer, who held the equivalent post for the Army.

Three years later, when the Navy planned to send Adm. Crowe to London and force him into retirement, his friends in the other branches began a widespread and unusual campaign to save his job. Naval officials, outraged at the interference, fought back but lost. Adm. Crowe was named commander of NATO's southern flank, which came with a villa in Naples.

In 1983, because of his limited command experience at sea, he lost a chance to be commander in chief of the Atlantic fleet. But he was sent to the equivalent post in the Pacific. That's where he had the opportunity to impress Reagan and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger in 1984, with a brilliant, unscripted presentation. The next year, he was made chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but not without opposition from the Navy.

Adm. Crowe, a renowned raconteur with an unlimited supply of humorous stories, charmed Congress at his confirmation hearing.

"My father used to say: 'Your mind is like a parachute. If it won't open when you need it, it is not much good.' I have an open mind," he said at the hearing. "My minister said that the difference between a eulogy and a testimonial is that in the case of the testimonial, there is one man in the audience who believes it."

He also appeared as himself in a 1989 episode of the TV show "Cheers."

He told a Washington Post reporter in 1993 that arguments against allowing homosexuals in the armed forces are "generated more by emotion than by reason" and that the military could adjust to their presence just as it has to the inclusion of minorities and women.

Still, he said, "to say that because gays are coming in the military that the military's effectiveness will be destroyed, [that] we will no longer be the world's premier military . . . I do not believe that. . . . I think it's a peripheral issue."

Clinton appointed him ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1994, a job he held for three years.

After returning to the United States, Adm. Crowe divided his time between teaching at the University of Oklahoma and studying military issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He also ran BioPort Corp., the only licensed manufacturer of the anthrax and rabies vaccines in the United States.

He received the Defense Distinguished Service Medal four times, and he was also awarded the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star and an Air Medal. In 2000, Clinton gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Survivors include his wife of 53 years, Shirley Grennell Crowe of Mitchellville; three children, Marine Col. W. Blake Crowe of Washington, J. Brent Crowe of Alexandria and Bambi Coval of Alexandria; and four grandchildren.

Since 1999, Adm. Crowe had taught a class in security decision-making at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. He told midshipmen last year that although he didn't know how to get out of Iraq, he could help them learn how to avoid the next Iraq.

"Bending another culture to your will can't be done on the cheap," he said. "Our resources are not unlimited, and we should not be led to believe otherwise." Every administration "underestimates the cost in time, money and casualties," he said. "Voters should be die-hard cynics when evaluating such predictions."